


Not All Right

by lyricwritesprose



Series: Scatterings of History (Publication Order) [3]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen, Historical, POV Outsider, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, WWI setting, War flashbacks, just from that you know that people aren't being too good about PTSD, original character has experienced some major ableism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:48:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22942813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose
Summary: A young man is in a field hospital during World War One.  Aziraphale wants to say something that might help.  But what do you say to someone who's wounded in a way nobody can see?
Series: Scatterings of History (Publication Order) [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1634191
Comments: 29
Kudos: 170





	Not All Right

Ernest’s eyesight was darkening again. It started with peripheral vision, as if he were in a slowly closing tunnel, and then crept across the main part of his sight. It made his heart hammer and his hands go clammy.

He didn’t call for help. The doctors never helped. And besides, it was the middle of the night.

But the darkness made things less real, and meant he started hearing guns. Their guns or our guns, it didn’t matter much, what mattered was that he couldn’t tell if he was really back  _ there, _ back there and unable to see and lost in the dark—

Ernest whimpered.

And, improbably, a soft hand covered his. “I’m here.”

Ernest choked off the sounds rising in his throat. He didn’t want to hear the words again. Coward, malingerer. “Are you a doctor?” The voice had been male. The hand was uncalloused, smooth, and that usually meant a doctor.

“No,” the voice said. “But I am a healer of sorts.”

Ernest cringed inwardly. “Psychiatrist.”

“No, not that either. Why minds work the way they do—that’s largely a mystery to me. Despite the amount of time I’ve spent watching over people.”

“They say it’s not my eyes. They say it’s hysterical blindness. That I must be from bad stock, or I’d never be weak enough for this.”

There was a short silence. The hand didn’t move from Ernest’s. “I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you,” the voice said, “that perhaps your eyes are trying to protect you.”

“From the War, you mean? Getting me dishonorably discharged? I guess that counts as protecting me.” Ernest’s voice was bitter.

“From seeing things that no human should have to see.”

Ernest wasn’t sure what to say to that.

“I was in a War, once,” the voice said finally. “A long time ago.”

“Second Boer War?” Ernest hazarded.

“No. No, I am—considerably older than I sound. When I say a long time ago, I mean it.” The voice was silent for a moment. “It’s best understood as a metaphor, really,” he went on, musing, sounding almost as if he was talking to himself. “And this War is a good metaphor for it. If the word ‘good’ can be applied to something like that. Trenches. Gas, or weapons enough like gas. Bombs, or something like them. I was—the ranks don’t exactly line up. I had a platoon under me, so . . . lieutenant? Lieutenant fits. I was a lieutenant.”

Ernest had a quiet, helpless hatred for officers. But he was, despite himself, curious. And if this unknown person didn’t keep talking to him, he would be alone in the dark. “What happened?”

“They dropped—a bomb? Close enough—into the trench where I was stationed. I wasn’t hit, not badly. My . . . staff sergeant was in front of me, you see.” The voice was distant, detached. “But in this war—you have to imagine a war where Death doesn’t show up to relieve the agony. My platoon, a good portion of it, was torn to pieces in front of me, and they were all still moving.”

Ernest’s throat was tight. “It doesn’t work like that.”

“I did say your war was only a metaphor. And there’s not a very good metaphor for what I did next. Which was to take the injured—the bits that were still coherent enough to rescue—and put them inside myself. Inside my mind.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There’s no exact equivalent. If you picture the mind as a landscape, or a room, then it stands to reason you’d be able to put things into it. And really, you do that all the time. Memories, pictures of people. Things you can’t bear to forget, things you want to forget but can’t. When everyone around you exists as a sort of thought, rather than a physical object, it’s possible to take those thoughts into yourself. The healers did it regularly. Their version of stretcher duty.” He was quiet for a moment. “Of course, they were quite definite that it was only safe to carry one wounded soldier at a time.”

Ernest had a taste for weird tales and lurid fiction, and the possibilities were swarming inside his mind now. If he wasn’t just talking to a madman—but the voice didn’t  _ sound _ mad.

Maybe Ernest was the madman. Maybe he was talking to himself.

“Where did you say this war was?” he asked.

“I didn’t.” The voice was silent, and then resumed. “The trouble was, as soon as I had put myself on, well, impromptu stretcher duty, the trench was overrun by the enemy.”

“Not the Huns.”

“You could call them Huns if you want. It would be nice, wouldn’t it, to think that they all chose barbarism with their eyes open, that I cut my way through ghouls rather than frightened people . . . because that’s what I did, you know. Slashed my way out.”

Ernest thought about it. “This war had bayonets?”

“A sword. I had a sword. Or close enough. That War was, in many ways, not as sophisticated as what you’re doing here.” Another pause. “I lost track of how many people I—not killed, but cut apart. They had to come at me one at a time, you see. Narrow trench. So I just—cut them down, kept moving forward, kept my back to the wall in the spots where it widened out, and finally I made it back to where  _ my _ side was dug in, and I nearly cut them apart too. It was like—becoming a machine. Like the sword was pulling my hand along, not the other way around. Like I had become a disparate collection of parts, coincidentally moving together, and my mind was dragged along like a balloon.”

He said it calmly. But Ernest was used to different kinds of calm, and he didn’t think this one was a good one. “You were rescued,” he said. “Your people, they took care of you.”

“Oh, yes. They took me, and they pulled my platoon back out of my mind, and they brought me to the base hospital and told me that I was under  _ no _ circumstances to get up before a healer authorized it, that I was much more wounded than I had thought. I spent—a long time there, although ‘time’ is another metaphor under the circumstances. And then finally, when I was fit for duty, cleared to lead the survivors of my platoon back to the front—the other side Fell. The War ended. I was highly honored for my efforts, although they still didn’t feel entirely like  _ me.” _

It was, Ernest thought, a story without a point. At least for him. “You were a hero,” he said bitterly. “Got your people back, or some of them. So, why tell me? To show me what a real soldier should be like?” He lifted his head from the pillow. “You, you got a  _ commendation. _ Have I got that right, amid all your ‘metaphors?’ So don’t come over here and act like you can relate to a weak, hysterical coward who couldn’t even save his best friend, because—”

“The  _ point,” _ the voice said, with a kind of precision and force that stopped Ernest mid-rant, “is that this was the War in Heaven, the War against Lucifer, before the Earth was formed or imagined, and  _ I’m not over it.” _

Ernest opened and closed his mouth without sound.

“I’m not over it. I’m  _ better, _ yes. Long years go by when I don’t think about it. But facing another battlefield? Actually  _ going _ to Ypres? That—wakes it all up again. There are scars on my very being, and the fact that they’re not immediately visible doesn’t mean they aren’t there. So when the doctors come tomorrow, and prattle about weak nerves and bad stock and whether they think you’re a malingerer or just an incurable coward—I would like you to remember that  _ I, _ at least, can tell that you’re severely wounded. You mustn’t listen to them, Ernest. Trust in what you know, deep inside yourself:  _ you’re not all right. _ Allow yourself to be not all right. Whatever discharge they give you—know that it  _ should _ be an honorable one. In a better world it would be.”

“I didn’t tell you my name,” Ernest said.

The hand withdrew from his. “No. You didn’t.” Briefly, the hand covered up Ernest’s eyes, a cool, soft touch, and then withdrew. “This is temporary. But it should help you get through the night.”

Ernest blinked, hard. His vision—it started as a tiny light, far off, like the end of a tunnel, and expanded slowly. He was back. He was  _ here. _ In the hospital, the solid, real hospital.

There was nobody beside his bed. Ernest had almost expected that.

But he couldn't quite convince himself that it had been a dream.


End file.
